“Nay, miss! His Grace forbade ye!”

She sent her most quelling stare at the young groom. “Fetch a bridle. And be quick about it.”

He blinked before vanishing into the tack room to bring the requested halter, which she swiftly placed on the mare. Then she led the horse to the mounting block.

“Yer saddle, miss!”

“There’s no time. Have you a knife?”

The groom dug in his pocket and produced a small one in a battered leather sheath. Handing it over with obvious reluctance, he eyed her as if she were a madwoman. And she was mad, Natalie knew as she tucked the knife into the bodice of her ballgown. She was mad with fear and fury that anyone would dare to threaten Leo.

Ignoring the gawking groom, she stepped onto the mounting block, hiked up her skirts, and threw her leg over the horse. She’d ridden bareback often as a girl, though only on her father’s horse farm and never in the city. If any of the society snoots could see her now, with her silk stockings exposed to mid-thigh, they’d condemn her as an irredeemable hoyden.

They could choke on their rules.

Hadrian could be no more than two minutes ahead of her. She prayed he’d picked up Wymark’s trail and they could find Leo. With a determined kick of her gold dancing slippers, she urged the mare into the gloom of the mews and out onto the street.

Richard parked his phaeton in the narrow alley and hoped it wouldn’t be stolen. There was no stable behind the derelict house and he hadn’t dared to bring one of his father’s grooms for fear of having another witness to his crime.

He tied the reins to a broken fence post, his fingers clumsy from the fright he’d endured. The moment he’d spied Clayton’s face, dark with fury, across the ballroom, he’d known with sick certainty that the gig was up. By horrid mischance, the duke had already discovered the boy’s abduction.

And he suspected his cousin of the deed.

Richard cursed his rotten luck for having run into the duke and Miss Fanshawe in the garden, right after he and Bert had bundled the squirmy little devil into the coach. At the time, he’d only been relieved that they hadn’t noticed the red mark on his forefinger where the bugger had bit him. If all had gone according to plan, Richard would’ve had an iron-tight alibi simply by staying at the party all night.

But Clayton and Miss Fanshawe had put two and two together with terrifying speed. The fact that the duke had chased after Richard confirmed the awful truth. His only stroke of luck had been making a clean getaway in the phaeton that Bert had left for him in the mews just in case such a quick exit was needed.

Now, he grabbed the mask that he’d tossed under the seat after the abduction. It was merely a precaution, for his nephew ought to be asleep in the upstairs bedchamber.